Reading Time: 7 minutes Three men in suits, with the carefully groomed looks of advanced-middle-age males, stand on Beirut’s landmark cliff and contemplate the mysteries of the sea that looms some 150 feet below them. One is a reputed banking economist, one a famous government technocrat, and one, with a much cheaper suit, the driver/bodyguard that brought them to…
Lebanon needs a national strategy for education
Reading Time: 4 minutes The academic year 2019-2020 has been the most dysfunctional one Lebanon has experienced in recent memory. It has also highlighted discrepancies in the quality of education that high-income families have access to versus that which low income families can afford. This inequality needs to be addressed and rectified if Lebanon is to place its hope…
Pandemic brings needed media self-reflection
Reading Time: 4 minutes What is in a magazine? From the perspective of us who write and edit the content of Executive, it is a striving for truth, meaning a constant quest and never-ending chase for an elusive public good of the first order. In times of crisis, this striving for truth is often the most valuable contribution that…
Facing the economic crisis with productive realism
Reading Time: 3 minutes It plainly is depressing. Practically every story in this issue of Executive starts—if not with the scary ad-hoc topic of the coronavirus—but with a reference to the dire economic straits that Lebanon is in. And even before the March issue went to the newsstands, the mood among some of our online readers seemed to be…
Lebanon faces growing unemployment
Reading Time: 5 minutes The last study on unemployment in Lebanon—conducted by Lebanon’s Central Administration of Statistics (CAS) in partnership with the International Labor Organization in 2018- 2019—revealed a general unemployment rate of 11.4 percent, reaching as high as 23.3 percent for youth. In light of the past few months, there can be no doubt that these percentages have…
Reflections on the Lebanese revolution
Reading Time: 3 minutes When crowds began to gather in Downtown Beirut on that fateful evening on October 17, 2019, few could have predicted that, a 100 plus days later, Lebanon would be still in the furrows of a revolt with almost daily protests across the nation, several clashes between protesters and party shabiha, and with riot police—and road…
Lebanon’s new government must focus on priorities
Reading Time: 3 minutes Lebanon has a new Council of Ministers. This is, from one perspective, a clear and present improvement. Having a government as a sovereign state is an absolute and total prerequisite to function as a country in the global concert of nations. In this sense, the serial failures of Lebanon to swiftly move and empower new…
Lebanon’s uprising has potential ripple-on effects
Reading Time: 8 minutes As the aftermath of the Arab Spring saw the Levant descend into another iteration of political posturing and advantage seeking of what in earlier times was often derogatorily called Levantine behavior, Iraqi-Lebanese journalist Husain Abdul-Husain shared his dismay. In a story published five years ago, he drew as his conclusion from a decade of Iraqi,…
Come together to further one of Lebanon’s favorite exports
Reading Time: 3 minutes In a country where it feels there is often little to be proud of, the Lebanese wine industry has offered us quite a few reasons to hold our head high—and could offer us even more if the industry learns to collaborate on a wider scale. The wine industry has seen a lot of growth over…
Lebanese investors must stay alert to opportunities
Reading Time: 3 minutes In today’s Lebanon there are two biases. Let us call them the phoenix bias and the shithole bias. The first is the narrative of an indestructible culture, a country and haven of wealth that has never defaulted on its financial obligations and where no depositor of wealth has to fear the disappearance of a single…